Fiction. "This collection of always-original stories and a novella is fascinating, deeply moving, often lyrical, and occasionally brilliantly bizarre. Hoggard knows as much as anyone on earth about the small tender mercies and brutalities of people, whether intimately together or breaking apart.I have seldom read anyone so well-tuned to the rhythms of children and fractured families. It is as if John Cheever had morphed with Raymond Chandler and Carson McCullers somewhere in that vast land of Texas. The writing is simple, occasionally almost delicate, yet layered with interpretive possibilities.Herein also lies the best dialogue I have read in a long long time. Hoggard is a poet, a seer, an astute psychologist, and a truly wonderful writer"—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War.